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Microsoft is driving users away

christitus.com

331–340 of 422 posts

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#331
post #117

I knew Windows was fucked when pressing WIN and searching for something brought up random crap from the internet instead of what I actually wanted. Do people at Microsoft use Windows or mac?

The UX designers reportedly use macOS and want to make Windows look more like it. Management uses Windows Enterprise which doesn’t have the ads. Everyone who cares about pre-8 Windows installs Open-Shell.

So I wonder what Mac OS UI they're imitating when they put ads and other junk in the start menu?

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#332

I think that Windows was kind of usable till Windows 7. Windows 10 was not that bad from a performance point of view, an improvement over Windows 7, but it had a ton of bloatware that you had to clean up with third party applications, after it it was kind of ok. Anyway, I use Linux and to me Windows is so far behind, for example only in recent years they introduced features such as virtual desktops that in Linux DE a…

If your linux system update included a new kernel you _will_ need to reboot to actually use the new kernel. I am not aware of any desktop distros that come with kernel live patching enabled.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope that more people switch It's reached a point where it no longer really matters. Linux is good enough, usable enough, and supported enough, that getting more users won't change much. It might actually be worse if a lot more users, with a lot of wide-ranging needs and demands, switch to Linux. At least, I am happy with the current state of Linux usability, and no longer care to evangelize the benefits of being…

But I don’t think Linux is good enough, usable enough or supported enough! The out of the box experience on Ubuntu doesn’t even come close to modern macOS or Windows 11. Sure, if all you need to do is use a web browser then you’d be fine with a Linux GUI most of the time. But then a Chrome Book is better at that point.

How not? I have used it on about 5 devices in the last few years and it has worked out of the box every time.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#334
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope that more people switch It's reached a point where it no longer really matters. Linux is good enough, usable enough, and supported enough, that getting more users won't change much. It might actually be worse if a lot more users, with a lot of wide-ranging needs and demands, switch to Linux. At least, I am happy with the current state of Linux usability, and no longer care to evangelize the benefits of being…

My own experience doesn't reflect that. I've been using Linux for work for years and tried to switch from Windows to Linux for games. NVIDIA drivers and game support on Linux is not an experience I'd recommend to anyone without experience. On laptop it's awesome, unless you have both an iGPU and dedicated GPU, then switching properly is a pain. WiFi drivers are a hit or miss: some cards are great, some others are not…

been using linux as a daily driver for years now. like since 2009.

gaming on it is fine, and the nvidia binary blog was never a problem, even with the basically-alpha-test software that is Fedora.

currently very stable with AMD hardware. playing CP2077 at ultra high with no issues.

the only real challenge I've had is a grad school course or two that have niche software that required Windows, and that was solvable via a Windows VM.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO PowerShell is horrible. It is it an object, or not an object. You don't know, unless you know. How about operators? They make ZERO sense (-eq). They went supreme extreme on namespaces. I could write a paper on how bad PowerShell is. You can keep it. I'll stick with zsh or bash.

> How about operators? They make ZERO sense (-eq). […] I'll stick with zsh or bash. Ah yes. Bash, and its highly intuitive `if /usr/bin/\[ 5 -eq "5" ']'; then :; fi` comparison operators.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#336
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope that more people switch It's reached a point where it no longer really matters. Linux is good enough, usable enough, and supported enough, that getting more users won't change much. It might actually be worse if a lot more users, with a lot of wide-ranging needs and demands, switch to Linux. At least, I am happy with the current state of Linux usability, and no longer care to evangelize the benefits of being…

My own experience doesn't reflect that. I've been using Linux for work for years and tried to switch from Windows to Linux for games. NVIDIA drivers and game support on Linux is not an experience I'd recommend to anyone without experience. On laptop it's awesome, unless you have both an iGPU and dedicated GPU, then switching properly is a pain. WiFi drivers are a hit or miss: some cards are great, some others are not…

People who want to run Linux buy hardware and laptops that support Linux. The user you're replying to specifically said they don't care to evangelize the benefits because it works great for them.

Replying with an example of a Nvidia card and Ubuntu Snaps doesn't really address them because they're in all likelihood running compatible hardware with a distro that works for them.

Please continue to use other OSes with the blessing of the rest of us Linux users. No one is forcing you or trying to convince you otherwise.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Microsoft's got a huge majority of users captive and now they can do as they please, "Oh you don't like this obnoxious new 'feature'? Well what are you going to do about it?", like an abusive partner. If only there's some company with money and clout to offer an OS with the same level of user-friendliness... Too bad Google's product managers are just busy trying to advance their own careers, plus it's not like…

> If only there's some company with money and clout to offer an OS with the same level of user-friendliness... Legit question: do you think there will ever be a new commercial desktop operating system (not one that's given away for free) that isn't Windows or MacOS again in the next 30 years? Because Linux is free, and Windows is ubiquitous, and because you need a lot of hardware support and support for existing appl…

> Legit question: do you think there will ever be a new commercial desktop operating system...

Nope, no one is willing to put up the money for a long term investment.

If I had the billions, I'd fund an easily installable OS that can accept Windows hardware drivers (easier said than done...). Or the cheaper way would probably to fund a slick Linux distro that an average user isn't scared away, but I guess they already are slick enough nowadays?

I installed a Manjaro KDE distro on a secondary PC a while ago, and on login it had the option of X11 or Wayland, but Wayland wouldn't work on my setup... Sigh, the average user doesn't care to learn about windowing system options, they just want to do their work.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#339

It's amazing to me that Microsoft messed up Windows. All they had to do was not not change things, but they continued to force junk on me that I don't need, take power away from me, and spy on me. Honestly MacOS isn't much better. Linux is still crap software, but we've reached the point where most things can be done on Linux, so good riddance. I hope that more people switch and Linux continues to improve. There's ac…

> Linux is still crap software I've been using Linux as my daily driver since 2019 and I can tell you that the moments I got pissed off where due to companies being extremely hostile towards Linux (ahem, Microsoft) and making their shit with proprietary Windows libraries. Linux is not difficult, it's much easier to learn than to spend 5 hours on Windows trying to find out which UUID refers to the now-hidden old print…

When you say “Linux is much easier” we can’t pick this weird anecdote of troubleshooting a printer. Is the average printer setup in Linux much easier? What about getting wifi going out of the box? Or Bluetooth? Or even finding out if something is not right? I don’t want to sound like a Window defender (heh) but let’s be honest here. If I open device manager and I see a little triangle I know something is wrong. In Linux… ???? Where do you even go? I get that this is hacker news but Linux unless very polished will forever be a power user platform.

Don’t ask my mom to open the terminal in 2024, she would rather pay the bills with cash in person.

Re: Microsoft is driving users away

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Make bash, zsh, ... native for Windows Why? There is PowerShell, able to run on Linux and MacOS. And compared to Bash it is actually readable language.

IMO PowerShell is horrible. It is it an object, or not an object. You don't know, unless you know. How about operators? They make ZERO sense (-eq). They went supreme extreme on namespaces. I could write a paper on how bad PowerShell is. You can keep it. I'll stick with zsh or bash.

Huh... Everything is a object. But that object might be a string. And you don't have to know, you can ask.

I get that when everything is text, it becomes simpler to reason about. But you also have to do a lot of maneuvering to get information out of it. PS tries to give you more power.

My main gripe with ps is command discoverability: I don't know who thought that the "verb-subject" would be a good idea, because if I type "get-" and tab to auto complete, how the hell will I find the command about networking I want?

The learning curve also sucks, but I don't think it's worse than bash. I do remember spending six months with a bash manual tab open in my desktop back when I was starting Linux development.

There are also other crazy advantages ps have over bash, like the native ability to understand cmdlets and their parameters, powerful scripting capabilities with decent support for loops, conditionals etc.

And I don't event know what to tell you about the operators... They were copied from POSIX, so complaing about then is complaing about bash & co.

Finally, PowerShell also let's you access all of the dotnet namespace. This allows you to do a lot of stuff, because you would literally be programing instead of scripting.

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